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I have recently undertaken the arduous task of formatting the index to Blake’s typographical work, A Descriptive Catalogue. I say it was “arduous”, but I think I have only made it so.
Continue readingI have been most recently working with Hardeep on Blake’s epic poem, “The French Revolution.” If you remember from an earlier blog post (for all of our regular blog readers!), this is a typographic work that never got past proof form. As a typographic work, the transcription is far more straight forward than a manuscript would be, or so we thought. As I checked our transcription against David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (one of the standard sources used by the archive), I realized that typographic works can come with their own set of issues.
Continue readingOne of the goals of Team Color Code (sidenote: this is the small group of BAND assistants who are working on The Four Zoas. We’re affectionately known as TCC, which is a name that made sense in our early days and even though it no longer does, it has stuck) is to create a schema that can also be used to tackle transcription and display problems in other works. We’ve always known that the heavily-revised pages of Blake’s Notebook would benefit from an expanded tag set, but I’m starting to come across more and more works that could also use some of the elements that we’re developing in Team Color Code meetings.
Continue readingWikipedia says that
“Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work.”
I wonder whether this is anything like a useful opposition, in the sense that I doubt most “later critics” would make a case for Blake’s sanity as a necessary condition for his “expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work.”
Continue readingClarity is elusive—a particularly ironic characteristic of a manuscript that Blake so heavily marked up with instructions on how to read it.
Of course, reading is one thing. Encoding is another.
Continue readingCongratulations to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly for its recent publication of its Fall 2014 issue!
Continue readingI’ve been proofreading the Genesis manuscript (for longer than I’d like to admit), and surprisingly, I’m finding myself implementing a really basic rule of the archive for more or less the first time. The only other handwritten works I’ve ever proofed or transcribed were all letters. Since letters are basically one of a kind, and there are few guideposts besides common sense to indicate what Blake is saying most of the time, if a word or a letter looks funky, I transcribe it funkily. The “transcribe what you see” rule is very straightforward in these cases.
Continue readingIn Rochester, we get a little caught up with transcription practices. It’s not [entirely] our fault. The Blakeians at UNC-Chapel Hill focus on Blake illustrations while the manuscript/language stuff gets sent up north. Blake’s often mystifying script surrounds us, and we have been charged (by God, sure) to transcribe our way out, into the promised land of textual clarity.
During this process, we think unreasonably hard about impossibly small details. Is that a period or a comma? (What is our policy on commas again?) Is that “d” really there? Am I seeing things? Wait, or did I read it?
If you ever wanted to bridge the gap between punctuation and existentialism, textual editing may be for you.
Continue readingOne of the main principles at the Blake Archive, is “transcribe what you see.” This has been useful in making many editorial choices about how to represent an image of a work on a digital page. As Laura discussed in her Sept. 24th post, there is sometimes a tension between what we read and what we see. I am currently proofing our transcription of a manuscript known by its first lines, “then She bore Pale desire.” Just like Laura, there are times when I am unsure if I am seeing the manuscript or reading the manuscript. One example of this deals with the spacing between handwritten characters:
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